HP 290 G1 SFF / UUID present several times

[dereil]

Hello,

I have the following problem: We use some HP 290 G1 SFF in the company. Unfortunately, some of these devices share the same System UUID. This leads to problems with our backup software, among other things. We need to change the UUID to make the backups on the devices work normally again. I have already tried to adjust the UUID with the current HP BCU, but I get an error message. "Access denied", returnCode="6", BCU Return Value="13" What am I doing wrong?

Thank you, Michael

[SDH]

Duplicate UUIDs are statistically not supposed to happen if they are randomly generated. There is a nice little article on this HERE .

Are you sure you're talking about UUID, and not MAC addresses? There are far fewer possible MAC addresses so duplicates rarely can happen with them in one network.

I can imagine, however, a screwup at the factory. A UUID (burned into the firmware of each HP computer) if not randomly generated could conceivably be burned into more than one motherboard if the process was not working properly. DGroves, from his large-enterprise level of interaction with HP, would likely know more about this issue.

We run some software that is licensed to the UUID of specific workstations. That software used to look for the workstation's licensed MAC address but there were ways to spoof the MAC on the OS level or even buy a NIC that could be EEPROM flashed to any MAC wanted. So that company eventually changed to probing the workstation for its UUID instead because that is supposed to be fully secure. If there was a way to reflash a new workstation's UUID to match a previously licensed UUID you can imagine that would only be available to the highest levels of HP supervisors, not to the user or HP FSE levels.

[DGroves]

To "SDH" and the "OP" ........in all my years in "IT" I've never seen or heard via 3rd party of duplicate UUID's for any business/workstation/server system from any major vender (can't comment on consumer systems)

the only way this might happen on the above systems is if a new replacement board was installed and someone copied the UUID sequence from another system which i again find extremely unlikely but remotely possible

while HP does have a developer tool called HPBIOSUUID, it's not something i can post